Dancing with the Devil: The Last Days of Resurrection Mary

By J. F. Sinkovits

In a desolate stretch of highway on the southwest side of Chicago, a young blonde woman known only as ‘Mary’ has been haunting the living for decades. From police officers to cab drivers, and from airline pilots to curious teens, many have reported chilling encounters with her. But there’s a twist: Mary has been dead and buried since 1936. Why does her restless spirit persist in making such frequent appearances even nearly a century later? Trapped in a web of dangerous political intrigue in life, what is it that Mary so desperately seeks in the afterlife? Why can’t she find eternal peace? As the sightings continue to unfold, this gripping tale unravels the mystery behind Mary’s ceaseless wanderings on this lonely, otherworldly expanse of Chicago roadway.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798889106708

J. F. Sinkovits

J. F. Sinkovits is of Austrian heritage and resides in the Chicago area, although he has also lived in California. Blessed with a vivid imagination, he enjoys, among other things, writing fiction, oil painting, all things automotive and aeronautical, as well as travel.

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About the Author

J. F. Sinkovits is of Austrian heritage and resides in the Chicago area, although he has also lived in California. Blessed with a vivid imagination, he enjoys, among other things, writing fiction, oil painting, all things automotive and aeronautical, as well as travel.

Dedication

To my family and friends, who not only tolerate my runaway imagination but actually encourage it.

Copyright Information ©

J. F. Sinkovits 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Ordering Information

Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Sinkovits, J. F.

Dancing with the Devil

ISBN 9798889106685 (Paperback)

ISBN 9798889106692 (Hardback)

ISBN 9798889106708 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023920985

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

[e-mail]

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Part One

The Present Day

Chapter One

The violent storms which had hammered the Chicago area earlier in the day had now moved out, and the derelict Willow Run Country Club sat forlornly under the heavy broken clouds that scudded across the face of the bright autumn full moon. The Willow Run had in its heyday long ago been an elegant building that had catered to the brightest lights of Chicago society.

At the driveway entrance, the large Willow Run Country Club sign, its faded paint badly peeling, still hung from two rusty link chains attached to a wooden crossbar, but it too had seen happier days. A smaller CLOSED sign, weathered and decayed with time, had decades earlier been nailed diagonally across the face of the larger sign that swung on its chains and creaked persistently in the cold night wind.

The Willow Run lay directly under one of the approach routes to O’Hare International Airport, and the steadily increasing whine of jet engines suddenly shattered the deathly stillness of the late October night. An aircraft, low in the sky on final approach, suddenly screamed overhead only a few hundred feet above the rooftop of the building. It was quickly lost from sight over the trees of the forest preserve that bordered the rear of the property.

The plane had only just disappeared, and its whine had faded to silence when a young woman came to stand uncertainly before the sign. She had a pair of shapely legs clad in white silk stockings, and she wore a white party dress that had long ago ceased to be in fashion. The woman stared vacantly at the derelict sign for a long moment and then turned hesitantly to move on.

* * *

Rob Donovan was flat-out exhausted. He’d just gotten done working a flight from Los Angeles, and the unstable weather system east of the Rockies had made the trip extremely turbulent. It had been so bumpy that he’d ordered the flight attendants to discontinue cabin service and had turned on the seat belt sign to restrict them and the unhappy passengers to their seats for nearly an hour. As the pilot flying, he’d found it a daunting challenge to keep the aircraft in level flight. Thank God, he’d thought, that the airline required its pilots to undergo periodic simulator retraining to sharpen their skills for difficult circumstances such as this.

Things had gotten even more challenging once they were on final approach to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The weather systems which had clashed earlier in the day over the Midwest had produced powerful thunderstorms that had dumped massive amounts of rain and golf ball-sized hail on northeastern Illinois. Reports of the dangerous storms had first come as they had been flying just west of Omaha, Nebraska, and Rob had been certain that they’d be rerouted to an alternate airport, most likely to General Mitchell Field in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which lay just north of the deadly storm track. The 180-plus passengers on the aircraft would just love that, Rob had thought cynically. They would bitch and moan and groan about it, and even before he’d have shut down the massive aircraft’s two engines, they would have begun composing irate emails to the airline on their laptops, tablets, and smartphones, complaining about the inexcusable inconvenience and indignities they’d suffered. Somehow, they would forget to be thankful that they had landed in one piece and wouldn’t be the lead story on the ten o’clock news and that they weren’t going to be leaving the airport in body bags.

They had just passed south of Des Moines, Iowa, when they’d gotten notification that the storm cells had now moved out of the Chicago area and were over Lake Michigan, so there would be no diversion after all. But Rob knew that all was not yet smooth sailing, for the thunderstorms had left much rainwater and strong crosswinds in their wake, and those always make for tricky landings.

Once he’d disengaged the autopilot, he had used his expertise to keep the Boeing on course toward a touchdown on the runway despite the strong buffeting air currents which had seemed intent on pushing the heavy aircraft off track. Despite the challenging conditions, Rob, being an extremely experienced, capable pilot despite his relative youth (he had just celebrated his thirty-third birthday two months earlier), had performed an impressively smooth, uneventful landing. The only drama had resulted from the considerable water spray that had drenched the cabin windows as the thrust reversers had deployed and the longer-than-normal slowing of the aircraft on the runway due to the wet pavement. Rob had breathed a sigh of relief and a prayer of thanksgiving as he’d accepted a congratulatory handshake from his Captain once he’d set the parking brake at the terminal gate about fifteen minutes after touchdown.

Nice job, Rob, Captain Schwarzwalder had said as he had clapped his First Officer on the back.

Thanks, Paul. That was fun, wasn’t it? Rob had asked cynically.

Paul Schwarzwalder had laughed as he’d unbuckled his safety harness. Well, that’s what they pay us the big bucks for, buddy-boy. Besides, a little drama every once in a while keeps us on our toes. He’d tossed Rob a crooked grin. That’s what they tell me anyway.

If you say so, Rob had replied, returning the Captain’s grin as he’d reached up to flick off the seatbelt sign. He’d imagined the resulting chaos in the cabin as nearly two hundred anxious people all sprang up from their seats simultaneously to retrieve their belongings from the overhead bins and fight their way toward the front of the aircraft, where the jet bridge was just being maneuvered into place. He had immediately been moved to immense pity for the poor flight attendants, and he wouldn’t have traded places with them for all the gold in Fort Knox.

Now, twenty minutes later, he settled himself into his SUV and prepared for the drive home. He still had a dull headache and was completely worn out from the flight, and it wasn’t until he’d swung the vehicle onto the 294 expressway that he remembered this was the night he and a few friends were to meet for a drink at the Blue Whale Bar and Grill, a favorite haunt of theirs because of its relatively convenient location. Still, of the four of them, Rob would have the longest commute home from the bar. He lived in the western suburb of Naperville, which meant he’d be facing about a forty-five-minute drive at the end of the evening. In contrast, Claire Benson, one of the airline’s female pilots, lived in Oak Park, closer to downtown Chicago; Laura Mallory, a flight attendant for another carrier, lived in the near western suburb of LaGrange, and Ben Harrison, who had nothing at all to do with the airlines or, for that matter, with the aviation industry in general, lived in southwest suburban Orland Park. The four of them had been close friends since college, with Rob and Claire’s friendship going back even further: they had known each other since the fifth grade. For some time now, the foursome had made a concerted effort to get together at least once a month, schedules permitting. Rob knew that today Laura had worked a flight that had come in from LaGuardia about an hour earlier, and Claire had come in from Munich on flight 434 earlier that evening. Ben was a software consultant whose travels took him all over the country and occasionally as far afield as Australia, so finding a time and a venue for their monthly catch-up sessions sometimes proved to be a daunting challenge. Yet, somehow, with rare exception, they’d been able to make it work for more than six years now.

As the sign for the ramp onto I-88 West came into view up ahead, Rob was sorely tempted to follow it and just head for home. He was dead tired, still had that dull, pulsating headache, and his neck and shoulders were knotted up like a ship’s mooring line. Right now he wanted nothing more than to stand under a nice hot shower and take a pain reliever—not simultaneously, of course, and not necessarily in that order.

The exit ramp was rapidly approaching, so Rob knew that he had only a few seconds to make a final decision. He tossed a quick glance at the dashboard clock. It was seventeen minutes past eight. The others would either already be at the Blue Whale or they’d soon arrive. They’d all have made a special effort to make it to this rendezvous, and it wouldn’t be fair to blow them off just because he was beat. Besides, maybe a couple of hours with a little booze and a lot of pleasant conversation would do him good. Before he could change his mind, he determinedly drove past the exit that would have taken him home, and he kept heading south.

He always found the lengthy stretch of Archer Avenue that cut through thick woodland particularly eerie. Although there were shopping centers and residential areas not all that far away, this section of the highway always gave the illusion of being out in the middle of nowhere, miles from civilization. Rob didn’t like driving through it even during the daytime (he didn’t really know why), but at night it positively gave him the creeps, and tonight it was even creepier than usual. There were no streetlights, and the substantial rainfall earlier in the day, coupled with the rapid temperature change that had accompanied the arrival of a strong cold front, was now creating pockets of dense fog along the lightly traveled road. He had been driving along Archer Avenue for several minutes already and had yet to encounter another vehicle heading in either direction. Because of his stressful occupation, he usually relished occasional solitude, but this was carrying things a bit too far even for him. He reached over and turned up the radio volume which, until now, had been nearly at its minimum setting. He suddenly craved the sound of another human voice even if it was only coming from the audio system.

As the pop tune that had been playing ended, the voice of the station’s disc jockey came out of the speakers just as Rob passed the entrance of the long-disused and derelict Willow Run Country Club, which he had flown over less than an hour earlier. The imposing French provincial-style building sat, forlorn and abandoned, at the end of the long, curving driveway that cut through what had once been an immaculately maintained front lawn, but which now was nothing but an unkempt field of overgrown weeds.

Throw an extra blanket on the bed tonight, boys and girls, the disc jockey advised. It’s going to be a chilly night in Chicagoland. Temperatures will dip into the lower thirties lakeside and the mid-to-upper twenties in the western boonies.

That’s just great, thought Rob. Just this morning he’d been lying poolside in warm, sunny southern California, and now here he was, coming back to this. Granted, this was the Midwest, and it was the end of October, but still…

Right now, it’s forty-three at O’Hare, forty-four at both Midway and the Lakefront, forty-one in Skokie, and already a chilly thirty-eight out in Lisle—

Rob frowned as a sudden, prolonged burst of irritating static drowned out the disc jockey’s pleasant voice. He took his eyes off the view out the windshield for an instant to give the radio the evil eye as he smacked the dashboard in a fit of pique.

Damned piece of Japanese junk! he muttered as he switched the radio off. His blue eyes went wide with alarm as he raised his gaze back onto the lonely road. There, in the middle of the highway, the ethereal figure of a slender young woman, awash in the glow of the SUV’s headlamps, emerged from the fog less than a hundred feet ahead of him. Frantic, Rob swore out loud as he lay on the horn, shattering the stillness of the late October evening with a strident blast.

The woman slowly turned to face him as he instinctively stomped on the brake pedal, pushing it to the floorboard. The brakes squealed in loud protest, and the tires smoked as the vehicle skidded and fishtailed on the wet pavement. It narrowly missed an inopportunely timed oncoming truck, whose driver swerved drunkenly toward the gravel shoulder as his vehicle’s horn blared furiously. It was unmistakably the auditory equivalent of a raised middle finger, which had undoubtedly been meant for Rob, and possibly for the reckless young female as well. The truck driver quickly recovered control of his vehicle, which soon disappeared into the damp night.

As Rob’s SUV skidded and finally came to an agonized stop at the side of the road, the young woman seemed not the least bit concerned that she had so narrowly escaped becoming a roadkill statistic and had come perilously close to making one of Rob and the irate trucker as well.

Sick to his stomach and quaking with both panic and anger, Rob pulled his vehicle off onto the shoulder and stabbed a button on his armrest to lower the passenger window. He leaned across as far as he could to make sure that the young fool standing cluelessly in the middle of the road could hear him clearly.

Dammit, lady, what the hell is the matter with you? he bellowed at her. You got a screw loose or something? Get the hell outta the road! After the harrowing flight he’d completed just about an hour earlier, he certainly hadn’t needed this kind of heart-stopping experience to cap off his evening.

The young woman took a few uncertain steps toward him and returned a glazed stare. For the first time, Rob noticed that she was exceedingly attractive even though she seemed to be wearing no make-up at all. Indeed, she appeared to be a rare natural beauty with classic features and clear unblemished skin that was in no need of cosmetic embellishment. He judged her to be in her early-to-mid-twenties. Her long blonde hair was done up on top of her head, and she wore what looked to be a fancy white party dress that had certainly been in style in a long-gone era. From the movies and photos he had seen over the years, he judged it to have been in fashion in the 1920s or possibly the 1930s. Perhaps, he surmised, she had been to an early Halloween party, had had a bit too much to drink, and had somehow wandered out onto this lonely stretch of road. But from where? True, they were not all that far from civilization, but the surrounding land was mainly forest preserve property. The nearest residential area was a good two miles or so away, and neither were there any shops, restaurants, or clubs in the immediate vicinity.

Rob’s curiosity about what this young woman was doing standing in the middle of a little-traveled highway on a dark, damp October night at nearly nine p.m. quickly diffused his anger. The blank look on her face gave him cause to worry that she might be in shock. Concern for the beautiful young woman’s welfare quickly replaced his initial anger.

Hey—you okay?

At the sound of Rob’s voice, the delicate beauty fixed her attention on him and hesitantly took a few steps forward. The peculiar look that came upon her face as she intently studied him unsettled Rob and filled his innards with the heebie-jeebies. As she stretched out her arms toward him, a radiant smile slowly blossomed on her attractive face, and the young pilot felt his flesh crawl. The strange young woman’s expression was clearly one of joyful recognition as if she were mesmerized by him and elated to see him, and yet Rob was certain that he had never met or seen her before in his life. He would surely have remembered her, for she was exquisite, with the kind of fresh, natural beauty that was not easily forgotten. The dark-haired handsome First Officer was quite accustomed to receiving admiring glances from women who found him attractive, but this was different. This woman obviously thought she knew him: of that, he had no doubt.

She took a few more halting steps toward him, and suddenly her hopeful look of recognition was replaced by one of deep disappointment. You are not him, she finally said sadly in a voice that was thick with a Germanic accent.

Rob’s skin stopped crawling as his curiosity ramped up again.

Him? Him who? What’re you doing out here anyway? Playing Mystery Date?

You are not him, the woman repeated firmly. She was obviously crushed, and Rob could tell that she was nearly ready to cry. Good Lord, what was up with this chick? He decided that she was almost certainly drunk. But then he wondered if perhaps she might be an escapee from a mental health facility. In that case, she’d clearly be incapable of taking care of herself. Then again, maybe she’d simply had a fight with her boyfriend and had been unceremoniously dumped by the lout in this godforsaken place. Whatever the case, Rob knew he couldn’t just leave her there alone in the dark on a lonely stretch of the little-traveled highway.

The woman backed away defensively as Rob got out and went around to the passenger side of the vehicle. He opened the door, took his pilot’s cap off the seat, and tossed it into the back.

Come on—hop in, he said gently.

The woman took a step forward and then hesitated. Rob offered her an encouraging smile.

It’s okay, I don’t bite. His smile grew wider. Well, not on a first date anyway—unless I’m bitten first.

A faint yet definite momentary flicker of recognition once again settled on the beautiful young stranger’s face. It was as if something Rob had said had struck a faint chord somewhere in the cobwebbed recesses of her addled memory.

Rob smiled again and beckoned to her encouragingly. Surprisingly, the mystery woman hesitantly came forward to settle herself onto the SUV’s passenger seat.

As they drove off, the climate system’s blower fan automatically switched into HIGH, and a blast of comforting warm air steadily poured out of the floor and dashboard vents. Without warning, it had suddenly gotten uncomfortably chilly in the vehicle—so cold that Rob found that he could see his breath. He hadn’t realized the temperature had fallen so much in such a remarkably short time. It was even odder that it seemed to him to be warmer outside the SUV than inside it.

Pondering his next move, the weary pilot decided the best thing to do would be to take his odd young passenger to the nearest police station which, if he remembered correctly, was only a mile or two down the road. The cops would know how best to deal with her. He quickly threw a glance at the girl in the old-fashioned white party dress and wasn’t quite sure what to make of her as she sat staring blankly out the windshield as if lost in a mental fog. Rob found the silence exceedingly disconcerting. Solitude was definitely not what he desired under these circumstances, so he attempted to engage his passenger in light conversation.

You shouldn’t be out here alone, he said. Streets are full of nuts, you know. He turned to smile at her, but there was no reaction. He wasn’t sure she’d even heard him. She just continued to stare vacantly out into the darkness.

Rising to the challenge, he tried again.

My name’s Rob, by the way.

In his opinion, anyone with any class at all would naturally have responded in kind, but the woman stubbornly maintained her silence, which he was beginning to find both irritating and eerily unnerving.

And then it happened—something so unexpected, incredible, and unfathomable that he just couldn’t wrap his exhausted brain around it.

As the vast grounds of